It’s time for another bi-weekly exec update! I feel that I haven’t quite been giving enough detail about what the Engineering Student Societies’ Council of Ontario is and does, so in this issue I want to go a bit more into depth on what ESSCO has been up to in the past year and what they have planned.
As many of you may know, I attended the ESSCO Annual General Meeting (AGM) back at the end of June. Apart from the great speakers that I mentioned were present at the conference, the conference presents itself as an opportunity to get new students involved as well as to wrap up (and debrief) all the old business from the previous year as we welcome a new set of ESSCO executives. The major projects that ESSCO worked on in the past year are the ESSCO Alumni Network, the ESSCO National Engineering Month (NEM) Rube Goldberg Project, the EcoFair, and the Lobbying Issues Action Committee’s (LIAC) report on Stress in Engineering.
One of the major initiatives that former ESSCO president and UW student (Spencer McEwan) undertook was establishing an Alumni Network for ESSCO. The goal of this is mainly just to keep in touch with former members, since they could potentially be a great resource for the ESSCO Executives and Project Directors. While ESSCO fell short of its goal to recruit 100 alumni members to its Alumni Network by this year’s AGM, the network is well underway with 31 members so far.
Another great initiative started by ESSCO this year, in partnership with the Ontario Science Centre, is the Rube Goldberg Project to celebrate the National Engineering Month. The project was led by Alessia Danelon (current president of ESSCO, formerly the VP Services, and also a UW student). The event serves as one of the methods through which ESSCO reaches out to the community in an effort to promote the Engineering Profession and instil interest for the profession among high school students and young children. For those of you who don’t know, the event had universities all across the province working together to create one huge Rube Goldberg machine. Each school built their own machine, which would then send a signal to another school’s machine via the Internet or text messaging. At the end of the chain, there was a final machine at the Ontario Science Centre which lit up a large LED sign saying “E4TW”, which stands for “Engineers for the World”. This event gathered a fair amount of media attention and even caught the eye of the Discovery Channel. After this year’s initial success, ESSCO is hoping to run the NEM Rube Goldberg project again next year. The event usually takes place in March, with plenty of planning going on a head of time. Come the next B-Soc term (Winter 2011), I will be looking for students who are interested in building Waterloo’s Rube Goldberg Machine, so please drop me a line if you are interested.
Further on the outreach front, ESSCO attempted a new initiative this year called the EcoFair. The event is like a mini engineering competition for high school students. This will give them a taste of some of the design projects that they might be exposed to if they enter undergraduate engineering. Unfortunately, the event was not able to run since many of the high school teams dropped out at the last minute, but I am optimistic that the idea will be revisited in the future.
Personally, I think that ESSCO is doing some great work on behalf of engineering students in Ontario. While I know many students in our faculty feel that all this outreach work is useless, I disagree. One thing that I have heard over and over is that when a doctor makes a mistake, one patient dies. But when an engineer makes a mistake, hundreds can die. Our profession is an important one, and outreach is a way for us to show the public what we really do, who we are, and what we stand for. ESSCO is helping to put our name out there so people know that engineers are working to better society.
With that said, ESSCO also has initiatives which bring more direct benefits to you, the students. Each year, ESSCO appoints a Lobbying Issues Action Committee (LIAC) to study a particular topic, and create a report on it. This past year, ESSCO ran a study on stress levels in engineering. The study is a year long process, in which the committee gathers information and then creates a report on the topic. The report is then presented to the Council of Ontario Deans of Engineering, which includes our own Dean Sedra. As a combined group of all the engineering schools in Ontario, ESSCO has a much stronger voice than one school on its own and has the power to actually influence academic administrations to bring about change. The current study on Stress Levels in Engineering is taking a bit longer than expected, so it is not quite ready yet, but ESSCO is currently looking for a topic to study over the course of the next year. Please let me know if you know of any pressing issues related to engineering students. ESSCO also has plans to raise the issue of high tuition fees for engineering students to MPs and other individuals and organizations that can help us curb the problem.
In general, the purpose of ESSCO is three fold. ESSCO represents the interests of Ontario engineering students. ESSCO performs outreach work to inform the general public about engineering in Canada. And ESSCO helps engineering student societies to better themselves. Every time members from our Engineering Society attend an ESSCO conference, they come back with many new ideas on how to improve our own EngSoc.
One thing that I forgot to mention at the last council meeting is that ESSCO has passed the motion to mandate it to create an engineering newspaper exchange. You should expect to see something on that front soon enough. In the meantime though, McGill has been kind enough to send us a few copies of their Technologic magazine. We should still have a few copies in the EngSoc office if you’re interested.
I hope this gives a bit more insight into why I go to conferences and what external organizations do for you. If you ever want to chat it about it some more, just stop me if you see me in the halls.
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